I'm not sure whether this is more evil or stupid, but it's
a whole lot of both.

Your "credit score" can be lowered for many reasons -- some
legitimate, some arbitrary, many which you are helpless to change
regardless of how responsible you may be. One variable which
inevitably results in a lower credit score is a lower income.

That's hardship enough for lower-income families when a credit
score is only being used for its intended purpose -- deciding whether
or not to extend credit. But as credit scores begin to be used for
purposes like this it is simple cruelty. This is simply a way to take
advantage of the poor and powerless because they are poor and
powerless and you can take from them whatever you like.

Credit scores are already being used now to deny people health and
auto insurance, or to charge them a higher rate. They are being used
by employers, to make sure they don't hire anybody who's
unemployed. And now the poor will face regressive pay scales even for
their heat and electricity.

And what happens when this portion of these low-income families'
monthly budget increases? That's right -- their credit scores will go
down. This is obscene. A clumsy measure of wealth is being used as
though it were a precise measure of virtue and responsibility.

U.Penn professor Anne Norton, in an aside in her new book on
Straussians:

When I began to teach we had many middle-class students.
Most of my students now are wealthy. They went to private schools and
took special classes for the SATs. They can afford to take unpaid
internships in the summer. Often they have family friends in the
House or the Senate or at the World Bank who can find a place for
them. They have nearly always been to Europe. There are still a few
students whose families are poor: sent to school on full
scholarship. Those I see have gone to private schools on
scholarship. They have lived for a long time in a world divided
between privilege and deprivation. If the students are middle class
-- I see fewer and fewer of them -- they and their parents are
burdened by debt. More often, they have gone elsewhere. The wealthy
-- those who went to private schools, who can afford to take unpaid
internships, who vacation in Europe -- often think of themselves as
middle class. Their easy assumption that any middle-class person can
afford what they can afford makes life hard for those who have to work
to pay for college, who have to ask how much the books cost for each
course they take, who have to wonder how they will repay their loans.

[T]he persistence of poverty over the
past three decades, notwithstanding the increase in real GDP, is a
remarkable commentary on U.S. capitalism. The poverty standard is a
real absolute one, so if the rising tide of GDP growth lifted all or
most boats, we would see a secular decline in poverty rates. It didn't
happen.

And a few that aren't:

With bioterrorism in the news, we have a need for experts who
understand the danger and deal with it responsibly. Which is why,
when one such person noted a procedural slipup in his own lab, and
properly reported it, he wound up
in prison.

If you didn't already know about Rumsfeld repeatedly confusing
Saddam Hussein (largely secular, dictator, captured) and Osama bin
Laden (religious fanatic, no political post, still at large), well, now
you know.

Atrios has some interestingposts on
who decided what about the attack in Fallujah this spring, based on an interview
with the commanding officer on the scene. A few of you may recall that I was awfully confused
about what we thought we were doing there; I still am, but so far, it still looks awful.

And one last one -- a New
York Times article that I never found something clever to say
about, so I'll just describe it briefly: a judge in Connecticut has
ruled that according to rules that protect the privacy of falsely
convicted people, the records of one such case can't be released to
anybody -- including the man himself.

At times, I find myself thinking it might be nice to live on a more
sensible planet. Regrettably, that wouldn't necessarily make it any
more pleasant...